The Goulets’ Visit to Pilot USA

Back in November of 2015, Rachel and I had the honor to visit the Pilot USA headquarters in Jacksonville, FL. Pilot USA is the distributor for Pilot products in the US, and supplies their products to retailers like us. It’s a very important, yet often overlooked part of the process of getting these incredible Japanese products to the US market. They opened up their doors to us and let us show you their operation and it is quite impressive!

We spent two days at Pilot USA touring their facility and meeting with some wonderful people at their company. While we were there we shot some video, which is what you see above here. Here is an outline of what we discuss in the video:

Focus: Goulet/Pilot relationship

GouletPens.com started 6 years ago, started Pilot relationship 4 years ago

Pilot was skeptical of us at first because we were a small mom-and-pop online only store

Been growing rapidly along with us, one of our larger suppliers. It’s grown to be our top brand in the last year

Started making gold nib pens, has now expanded to a truly global enterprise with Subsidiaries all over the world

Pilot USA

Pilot USA distributor was started about 40 years ago

One of about a dozen distributors in the world, one of the larger ones

300,000 sq ft facility in Jacksonville, FL

The Tour Itself

Visited for 2 days, toured the whole facility

Fulfillment center, 98,000 sq ft

highly automated

5 stories of storage

conveyor belts

receiving around 1,200 cargo containers each year!

“The Cage”

where all of the Pilot Fine Writing is stored (except Metropolitans)

This is all the stuff you’d see on our site

Production, 140,000 sq ft

light manufacturing and assembly

making blister packs

labeling

imprinting

testing refills

assembly of certain pens and parts

Offices

Very professional, courteous, spacious, and clean

Tea room/CEO’s chat

What the Goulet/Pilot relationship will look like in the future

heart and soul

not about quantity, but storytelling

passion and excitement

Namiki pens

Raden

Chinkin

Maki-e

works of art

7th century

Our future together

It’s about carrying on Pilot’s legacy, their heritage

The passion and spirit we embody speaks to them, and they want us to help to tell their story

A special thanks to everyone at Pilot USA for hosting us, it was an incredible experience and we’re incredibly grateful for this insight into the inner workings of the company! If you have any questions or comments, be sure to let us know below.